Better Hip And Shoulder Mobility At Once

Jessica Bento, Physical Therapist (Creator DVRT Restoration Certification, Knees Over Toes Course, DVRT Rx Shoulder, Knees, Pelvic Control, & Gait Courses)

I would say there probably isn’t one coach I have met that doesn’t wish to enhance their clients’/athletes’ hip and shoulder mobility. While most spend a lot of time trying to isolate these segments of the body (I know I use to as a young therapist), the truth is that we can really address both hip and shoulder mobility at the same time.

How and why do this?

The reality is that the hips and shoulders are connected. Huh? How is that possible? When we do look at chains of the body like the Spiral line we can see how fascia helps connect this specific muscles that really connect our lower body to our upper body.

Okay, there are a chain of muscles, but how does that relate to being ability to improve our hip and shoulder mobility at the same time? You can see now that an issue in the chain can impact both the hips and shoulders. That means if areas of our body aren’t creating stability (like our feet and core for example) then our body has to find that stability somewhere else. Since stability is a protective mechanism of our bodies, finding stability somewhere will be integral in how our body thinks we need to survive.

Since we have a very strong connection of the hips and shoulders through chains like the spiral line, it makes sense that we would train hip and shoulder mobility at the same time. What does that mean though? First, isolating these areas is one of the worst things we can do because if they don’t move already, trying to move them just more doesn’t make a lot of sense. We have to start to better appreciate movement ability is more a byproduct of our nervous system than the actual muscles and joints themselves.

This is where the Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) of proximal stability for distal mobility derives from. Creating stability in our feet (by grabbing the ground with our feet and driving into the ground) and providing feedback to our core on how to stabilize is an awesome way of building better hip and shoulder mobility.

What are some examples?

Working on core training that integrates these concepts at a foundational level like the dead bug is a great example. Caroline Juster shows great progressions here…

 

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We can see how Coach Laura Penton integrates these concepts by pulling apart the Ultimate Sandbag while we use different patterns and positions to create core stability while making the hips learn to be mobile in a wide array of positions to address the directional mobility the hips should possess.

 

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Strength Coach, Martin Adame continues to build on those concepts and shows that training hip and shoulder mobility just makes our training so much more effective and efficient. We don’t train the body as one just because we want to be different, we do so because that is what our body sees as making sense and being able to address multiple issues at one time!

Don’t miss saving 25% all throughout DVRT and when you invest in any of our Ultimate Sandbags or Water Bags you will ALSO get 2 of our follow along workouts for FREE! Just use code “sale25” HERE and that also means you can save big on our mobility programs you can find HERE

 

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